Do you remember how scared you were when you first learned how to swim? Do you remember how exactly your body attempted to move and react to a changing surrounding?

First you were probably panicking, and then you were trying to move just as if you were touching the ground. Finally you gave up and learned to do it quite the other way round.

You developed a new muscle memory and realized that swimming and walking have very little in common but both activities can be equally fun.

Practically any social media strategy has a resembling life circle.

Firstly you don't have a clue what's this all Twitter/Facebook/Google+ is about and want to run away to cold-calling, constant spam emails and sales pitches like my-name-is-Jeff-and-we-guarantee-you-number-one-position-in-Google-in-two-weeks-or-your-money-back.

Then you're trying to do Social Media just as if it were any other old traditional type of Marketing, but the problem is that it's not old, it's not traditional and it's not straight-forward.

Eventually you learn how to do, what I personally call, the right thing and become more or less decent in Social Media, but that's not what I am going to talk about.

The transition from each phase is painful, scary and soaked with sweat. The goal of this article is trying to understand what we are or were all doing wrong on the second base (I mean SMM, not love affairs).

Living in the age of Internet should have made people's lives easier. Seriously, we can find any information with just a few clicks and even if we misspell words a cunning algorithm will shed some light on our partial illiteracy.

However I am not going to talk about the fact that mankind would rather browse the web to learn how to make an awesome make-up for a perfect selfie rather than to find out if there's been a progress in AIDS treatment. What surprises me more is that a world where people are supposed to get connected easily even if they don't know each other is paradoxically closed for such kind of interaction.

We can find almost anyone on social networks but it's getting harder to have a chat with them if they don't know you personally. Some people call it privacy, others call it a challenge. Read more »

When looking into social media tools for your business, you might have discovered a lot of options. When you have a specific need, however, that can limit the number of tools you need to look into. If you want a comprehensive social media tool based on your business size, then you can choose based on price. For those looking for tools that will help with specific social networks and activities, here are 20 great tools to consider.

Dedicated Facebook Tools

First, let's look at two great tools that are designed just for Facebook and what they can help you accomplish in your Facebook marketing. Read more »

If you are engaged in Internet marketing and want to learn more about the industry, you may have heard of the website called Inbound.Org.

Inbound.Org is a great social news website entirely dedicated to everything related to online marketing. Basically, that is a community-based news platform, where members can submit the most interesting and up-to-date industry news and decide which one really matters.

The website was launched a couple of years ago but quickly won popularity with both seasoned and new internet marketers.

However, if you surf the Web, you may come across different opinions about the community. The point is that Inbound.Org is a unique platform that has a strict set of rules not everyone is aware about. That resulted in multiple TOS violations and was the main reason why lots of beginning marketers burnt their fingers when contributing to the community.

This post will explain how to avoid any pitfalls when using Inbound.Org, and teach you what to do to get most out of the website.

Read on to learn how to:

join the Inbound.Org community and set up your social profile there;

discover website's little-known features;

manage content on Inbound.Org the right way;

understand the content voting system;

avoid bans and penalties;

build your authority in the community and enlarge your social following.

Hashtags have become an integral part of our social media lives that have a clear projection in our ''real lives''. They are everywhere – on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, etc. Have we ever thought of the origin of hashtag and when exactly it became so ''mainstream''?

Hashtags didn't always have such prominence in our lives and their transformation can be called a true Cinderella story that you can read in this post. Let's start from the very beginning.

Time before Social Media

You'll be surprised but hashtag was firstly introduced in 14 century, spelled like ''lb'' and meant a pound in weight. In spite of its true origin the so-called pound sign has acquired some extra meaning as a hashtag on Social Media.

In 1988 hashtags were firstly used on a platform named Internet Relay Chat. Basically it's one of the first protocols on the internet that was used to send messages in real time. Hashtags were used to group messages and various information such as images, text content, videos and the like. # sign was used for its primary purpose – search. Read more »